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Inbound Marketing Age

The UK freight and logistics market is worth over £100 billion to the economy and has been seriously impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic. Heightened demand has been felt in food distribution, drugs, chemicals and reagents, PPE and other essential supplies. But other mainstream shipments have disappeared overnight.

No one expected 2020 to turn out quite as it has. As the coronavirus pandemic continues, we are all finding ourselves adjusting to a new, strange normal. And the impact of COVID-19 is being felt by every business across every sector.

As marketers try to maintain revenue flow and keep customers engaged during this exceptional time, they will be battling with a number of different questions.

How much should we talk about the coronavirus? What should we say? And how we should say it?

Do we carry on our marketing activities as normal? What if we come across as insensitive or opportunistic?

Business-as-usual might feel surreal at this moment in time. But marketers need to be thinking long-term. They need to keep building their brand and engaging with their audience.

So here are our top tips for managing your marketing activity during this period of uncertainty.

New research by Gartner predicts that by 2023, companies will reduce their budget allocation for influencer marketing by a third.

In their latest report, Gartner reveal that consumers are losing trust in brands and entities they don’t personally know and are instead turning to family, friends and local businesses to provide advice and information.

Nothing causes people to stop and listen like a great story. Stories can be used to teach, inspire, clarify and mobilise. In a world of information overload, stories can cut through the noise and influence people.

But according to Miller, the most crucial thing in telling your story is what your customers hear - not what you’re trying to say.

This trend is hardly surprising. Voice search is fast (3.7 times faster than typing) and convenient. Plus, with the best systems now operating with 95-97% accuracy, it’s becoming increasingly reliable.

Most smartphones are equipped with some form of voice-assisted search function, such as Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant. At home, smart speakers like Amazon Echo and Google Home are becoming integrated into family life.

For a B2B business, there are two broad marketing strategies you can follow for gaining sales. You could pursue a traditional inbound strategy that involves creating a small number of buyer personas – fictional profiles of typical buyers. These buyer personas then form the target for all your content and marketing efforts, ensuring that your creations are attractive to your target market in order to bring in leads and engagement.

In the past, the roles of Sales and Marketing have been fairly well-defined, understood and respected, but the changing nature of the market and buyers' behaviour has brought them into inevitable conflict.

Compartmentalised Departments

If we go back a few years, most companies had two, distinctly separate departments – Sales and Marketing.

In simple terms, Marketing would create all the sales materials and handle the brand positioning of the business. And sales would deal with the prospects and turn them into customers. It was more or less cut and dried.

As marketers, data analysis takes a firm seat in our weekly schedules. But so many of us are just skating across the surface of what can be achieved.

By shifting the focus from output toward outcomes, a business can maximise its performance and potential.

Your output is the avenue you take to achieve outcomes; it’s the daily activities you use to generate exposure, connect with prospects and promote your business. Your output includes your newsletters, your emails, your website, your blogs.

If you have been on social media, reading the news or following all things marketing, then you can’t help but have noticed the public response to the ‘banning’ of Iceland’s latest advert featuring the animated story of Rang-Tan – an orangutan whose had to leave his native forest due to palm oil production and ends up ransacking a little girl’s bedroom.

Currently, the advert is hosted on YouTube which has seen an estimated 30 million views (a figure that includes social media shares).

And a petition to “Release Iceland’s banned Christmas advert on TV” on Change.org is headed for a million signatures as of the time of writing.